


Gray

by sciathan_file



Category: InuYasha - A Feudal Fairy Tale
Genre: Canon Continuation, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-11
Updated: 2017-03-11
Packaged: 2018-10-02 11:42:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10217270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sciathan_file/pseuds/sciathan_file
Summary: Hers was the storyafterthe happy ending.  And these days it seemed that he was merely an absent presence within it.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I do not own InuYasha. I just play in Rumiko Takahashi’s sandbox when the fancy takes me.
> 
> Beta’d by the Earl of Birkenhead
> 
>  
> 
> **Cultural Notes:**
> 
>  
> 
> This is set primarily during the Edo Period (1603-1868) and continues on from the canonical ending of the manga. _Youkai_ are around, but not longer common phenomenon in society. They keep to either the fringes of society or remain beyond the view of humans entirely.
> 
> _Rounin_ are masterless samurai. During the Edo period, they could not move to another master without the consent of the last, so the number of rounin increased. They were also barred from taking up other trades. This led to a rise in rounin acting as mercenaries or other professions.
> 
> I’ve opted to use Japanese modes of address because they allow from some nuance not present in English and because the nuances of Japanese are very helpful with characterizing both speakers and their relationships with others.
> 
> Chichue: A formal term for "father" denoting high respect. Sesshoumaru refers to his father as this during the series, for instance.
> 
> Hahaue: A formal term for "mother" denoting high respect.
> 
> Oyaji: The equivalent of “my old man.” This, in sharp contrast to Sesshoumaru’s formal mode of address, is the word by which InuYasha refers to his father.
> 
> Nee-chan: A more informal variant of onee-chan, or older sister.
> 
> Otouto: Younger brother.
> 
> Oba-chan: Affectionate term for an aunt.

  
**Gray**

~sciathan file~

The woodpile was always a dead giveaway. 

One day she would come back from her rounds on the outskirts of the closest village, and there it would be: logs that had neatly, and (had she not known better) miraculously, materialized in a neat pile on the side of the isolated hut where she now lived alone.

The logs and his already stale scent would be the only indication for the next few days that he was around at all.

Sometimes, several days after the logs appeared on her woodpile, a rabbit or some fish would appear on the small surface she used for cooking. No explanation, no note… the precise cuts on the rabbit’s pelt the only sign of who had brought such a gift. 

She supposed that today’s rabbit, like the logs on her woodpile three days ago, was its own form of greeting. Words never had been his primary way of expressing himself.

She sighed, a small smile curving her lips upward, and, habitually tied the knot on her head-cloth all the tighter. She then easily hefted several logs into her arms, and walked into her small hut. Nestling the logs into the fire pit, she used her flint and a small bit of woodsy tinder to ignite them, just as she had been shown when she was a small girl. She hummed softly to herself—a tune from her childhood, one her long vanished mother had sung while she cooked— and she set about chopping up vegetables.

Without so much as glancing at the knife her daughter sometimes used to chop the ingredients up on the rare occasions she returned home, she removed the pelt, cleaned the animal, and diced the meat into even chunks, before sending them, with a quiet sizzle, into the waiting broth to cook. Then, she cooked rice to have with it and heaped three bowls full.

She set two of the bowls near the fire, just to keep them warm enough for whenever he happened to show up. Then she slept. 

She dreamed of his familiar scent and quiet footsteps. Sometimes that scent prompted a dream of a time long ago, now hazy and tinted with memory… of arms around her, and the sound of an equally strong heartbeat reverberating in her ears as she sat on his knee.

The bowls were empty by morning, stacked neatly together and resting on the raised platform outside of her hut, just to the side of the door. With the barest hint of a frown, followed by a habitual sigh, she bent down to retrieve them and then took them in to be washed.

“You could’ve come inside to eat with me!” she grumped towards the forest, but the words had long since had their sting rung from them through habitual use. Besides, she knew that he was likely out of earshot, even given his superior hearing. He probably wasn’t far away, though. That is, if he wasn’t just passing through. 

He might even come in. Or, she might go and find him. Either way, she’d see him eventually… she hoped.

She stepped back into her hut, suddenly realizing that she hadn’t yet put on her head-cloth. Now safely within the protection of her own familiar walls, she carefully arranged the cloth over the crown of her head, and bound up her long hair, just as she had done every day of what she recognized as her adult life. Adjusting the knot, she sighed, waiting for motion at the forest’s edge.

Everything was still. 

He had always been prone to vanishing without a word, even when her mother had been alive. He could invariably be found silhouetted against the moonlight, high on a tree branch, gazing off into the night. If her mother scolded him, he would only respond with a “Keh!” But he’d eventually come down and take her hand as she led him back home. 

But her mother had died and with no one to come for him, he had disappeared more, and more frequently, for longer, and longer stretches of time… In losing her mother, she felt almost as if she had lost her father, too.

Once she would have cried at this behavior, but she knew better now. They had come to understand each other a bit, though she still had trouble at times. Since then she had grown up and become a mother herself. But, during her childhood, she had not understood at all.

Her mother had at least tried to explain. She caught a glimpse when she first met her remote, cold uncle—a glimpse of what kind of family her father had had before her mother had come along. But the first night she really understood was when her father sat with her and told her in a quiet voice about his own mother. Only then had she understood what her mother meant when she said: “Family… is a hard concept for your father…but, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t the most precious thing in the world to him. He will protect and love you with everything he has.”

But understanding didn’t make it easy.

Sighing, she went outside to see that a few more logs had been added to her woodpile. She shook her head and simply went back into her hut to gather up her mortar and pestle to prepare herbs for today’s rounds. She absently heated the tea for young Ichirou’s fever, intently focusing on nothing.

Maybe she’d see him tonight.

***

She didn’t.

But, when she returned home there were several fish smoking slowly over her fire.

That familiar scent—the one that bespoke warm and comforting memories of childhood—pervaded the hut. The cushion—the one that was his from the house where she had grown up—had a dent in it that wasn’t there when she had left.

“Chichue,” she said softly. Calling him, however, did not suddenly bring him into being. 

That night, she left him a bowl of rice and a grilled fish near the heat of the fire.

When she awoke, his scent had faded and grown stale.

The food lay, untouched, cold beside the embers.

***

Autumn slowly began to bleed into winter. She intentionally left her woodpile slightly under filled, hoping that one day she would return from her rounds to see it full and stacked. Colds and fevers and coughs began to grow like weeds in the village, and each day, she would tie up her head-cloth, arrange it delicately over the crown of her head, adjust her long sleeves, and journey out to bring the villagers the teas, herbs, and concoctions she had been trained to heal them with years before.

She came back to her hut to the sound of wood being chopped.

And, surely enough, haphazardly strewn over the pounded earth in front of her hut were the leather pads and armor of a samurai. Only the sword was laid in an almost reverent manner—propped just inside the door, the magnolia wood case polished to a high gloss, the familiar aura of its _youki_ twisting against her own in a faint greeting. Propped crookedly on the wooden steps, next to the weapon, was a large helmet left on its side. The heavy worked faceplate that showed a red, snarling dog glared up at her. She glared back at it for a moment. “Keh!” she chastised it, arching an eyebrow as if daring it to comment back. Its metal face remained twisted in its silent snarl.

She set down her baskets of herbs and moved towards the sound of the ax.

Quietly, she perched on a rock downwind of him and simply watched. He was stripped to his _hakama_ , his dirty white _kosode_ fluttering, untied, around him as he moved. He had bound up his long hair in the fashion of another era. She noted, as he split another log, that a vein of gray marred the otherwise silky blackness of it all. With a satisfying _thunk_ the log split into two evenly hewn pieces and, resting the ax on his shoulder, he regarded his work and then, his black ears twitching, he turned to her, a smirk on his face.

“Been a long time, Nee-chan.”

She leaped lightly from her rock.

“That it has, my cute little Otouto.”

He frowned, his right ear twitching slightly. “Don’t your ears hurt, keeping them tied down like that? I hate stuffing mine in my helmet.”

She sighed, deliberately not moving her hands towards the cloth that bound her hair and concealed one of the many things that showed the strength of her father’s blood. 

“I was in the village.”

She needn’t say more. Her brother’s frown deepened.

“Don’t your hands hurt from all that rough labor?” she posed, starting the old argument in a bid to lighten the mood.

He buried the ax in the dirt and, following the script from their childhood, regarded his nails.

“I didn’t get Oyaji’s claws like _some_ people.”

She flicked one of her own sharp nails within the overly long sleeve of her kimono almost self-consciously.

“You know, Otouto, with my claws I can split my own wood. Been doing it for _years_.” To emphasize the fact, she whipped out her hand and cracked her knuckles. “I even did it for Hahaue and Chichue before you came along.”

At this mention of _before_ , her brother’s lips drew into a thin, grim line and, for a moment, he turned away from her isolated little hut and towards the forest that surrounded it. Then, almost softly, he responded, “Keh! What would Oyaji say if he knew I wasn’t lookin’ out for his women like he taught me.”

_“Woman,”_ she mentally corrected, but said nothing. Instead she thought of the gift of rabbits on her porch, scents gone stale in the morning light, and her woodpile, overflowing and neat: all silent testaments. And she thought of a woman whose scent would likely linger in her memories until the day she died, but whose face now was blurring in her mind, her mother’s dark hair and flinty eyes now awash in the gray of time. 

Her voice, however, she remembered clearly years after it had fallen silent. She tried to silence it now. She turned toward her house and keeping her own voice cheerful, she managed, “He’d thump you.”

Her little brother let out a bark of laughter, brittle and bright and a tad self-conscious. For a moment they both remembered childhood transgressions punished by a sharp and decisive hit to their skulls or a quick, strategic pulling on an ear. The “thumping” and the sound of her mother’s protest, were always met with a gruff “It’s for their own damned good.” (An explanation that, to both their amusement and horror, sometimes earned their father _his_ own kind of thumping.)

But after the thumpings, there was always a favorite food and the warm feeling of arms clothed in fire rat fur that held them close, positioned so that their noses were turned into the hollow of his neck. It was a gesture of immense trust, a position of silent vulnerability, and a way for them to take in that familiar scent that said “father.”

Brushing the memories away, she made a half-hearted excuse and went inside to make them something to eat. As she passed him, her brother grinned toothily, and avowed, as he always did, that he still “couldn’t cook for shit.” Rolling her eyes, she swept through her reed door, and stepped inside the hut—the same one her father and brother and long dead husband had built for her decades and decades ago. Standing there for a moment, safe in her own small domain again, she reached up and undid the knot that bound the cloth covering to her head. 

Her silver hair fell down her back, its strands intermittently marbled by almost imperceptible streaks of a darker gray. She waggled her white ears, relishing the unmuffled sound of the leaves rustling outside and the ax splitting log after log: her father’s daughter once again.

***

They ate rabbit stew that night, piping hot in wooden bowls that their mother had used to serve them dinner in during their childhood.

Her brother told her of his travels away from his tiny, mostly unused hut. He told her of red roofs and _shiza_ statues, of drinking sakè in Takayama, and of guarding a pompous wax merchant in the town of Uchiko. She traded occasional stories of fevers and coughs and birth, but the doings of village life were nothing her brother was unfamiliar with and it paled in comparison to the life of a _rounin._

When their wooden spoons had scraped the bottom of their wooden bowls, she moved to get the sakè, and, as they always did during their rare meetings, they moved out to the raised platform on the outside of her house to drink in the dark.

They drank in silence for a time, exhaling misty clouds as their warm breaths collided with the chilly air, merely observing the full moon as it hung in the sky.

When her cup had been drained, she chewed on her bottom lip and waited for her brother to break their silence.

He did in a way she wished he hadn’t.

“Have you seen Oyaji lately?” he asked.

She bit her lip all the harder, her fang nicking her slightly. Not wanting to speak for a moment, she poured herself another cup.

“He’s been around,” she answered vaguely, answering without answering. “You?”

“I happened to be in my hut on the last New Moon,” he said, taking a sip. “I stayed up with him, drinkin’ sakè…kind of like this.”

She drained her cup and she sighed. Foolishly, the liquid feeling warm in her cheeks, she allowed something important to spill out: “And did you… _talk?_ ”

Even in the dark she could see her brother’s eyebrow rise and a smirk come to his face.

“Talk about what, stupid?”

She made a vague gesture, before drawing her knees to her chest and wrapping her arms around them.

_Us. Hahaue. Loneliness…Life?_

Realizing her own foolishness, she merely looked at the moon feeling vaguely pathetic. Her mother’s voice floated back to her across the years, “…it doesn’t mean that family is not the most precious thing in the world to him.”

“Nee-chan, you’ve been trying to talk to him? Only Hahaue could do that. And maybe the monk…but…”

He trailed off, turning his attention away from his sister and towards the moon

“He comes here, you know,” she asserted almost defensively when the silence weighed heavily between them. “He comes…and…catches rabbits, and…chops wood, and—“ she gestured expansively, trying to explain.

“You haven’t _seen_ him, then,” her brother said bluntly, now turning his attention fully upon her. He had their father’s eyes and she could not look at him.

She shook her head, not trusting his voice.

“Onee-chan—some advice—“

“I don’t want it,” she cut him off stubbornly. He sighed and ignored her.

“Nee-chan, you push him. Memories are painful. And he’s…well, he’s—”

“I _know_ ,” she said decisively, her voice rising. “Don’t you think I don’t _know_? But we buried Hahaue, too. We buried the brother we never knew who died with her, too. We buried the monk, and Sango Oba-chan, and their children, and their _children’s_ children…and everyone else _together_. We have the same memories. We have the same blood. And—”

She took in the gray streak in her brother’s hair and brushed a tendril of her own out of the way, trying to articulate what shouldn’t be said.

She spoke her fear into the darkness, anyways.

“Maybe we’re just painful for him.”

“Keh,” Her brother said softly, throwing an arm around her, although his words belied his actions. “See what I mean? You know Oyaji can’t stand it when you’re a sad sack of a…of a…whatever you call the kids of a _miko_ and _hanyou_. But, I guess no one ever bothered to make up a word for us since _that_ will never happen again.”

There was a silence between them for a moment.

“And isn’t that the point—that it will never happen again? Isn’t that why he was gone so long after Hahaue died?”

Her brother drank a sip of sakè pensively, and looked towards the darkened horizon and the dark, gnarled trunks of trees that dotted their field of vision. It was like he was trying to look back through the many decades, to those three months after their mother’s body and been burned and buried, to the first time their father had _really_ disappeared…back to when they both had clustered on Sango Oba-chan’s porch straining to look at the head of the road, waiting for the familiar feel of _youki_ , that comforting scent, the silhouette of their father to return.

Three entire months later (Sango Oba-chan had muttered something about it not being three years this time, so the number had stuck in her head) their father had come back. He had held them both for what seemed like an hour without speaking. 

She hadn’t then, and still had not ever asked where it was that he had gone.

Silently, she leaned her head down onto her brother’s shoulder, suddenly intensely glad he had come.

“Nee-chan, do you doubt Oyaji loves you?”

Thinking of rabbits and her woodpile, bringing his familiar scent to the forefront of his mind, she whispered, _“No.”_

He clapped her on the shoulder and released her.

“Good,” he said. “Good.”

***

Her brother visited more regularly after that. He stayed through long portions of the winter with her and kept her woodpile full and fish plentiful at her table. (Secretly though, she knew that he was keeping an eye on her.) Her daughter and son, even though they had families of their own, occasionally came to mind their “old” mother when they had time (and each time, she was painfully reminded that her children almost looked to be the same age that she herself was). Winter faded away without anyone seeing her father, although it was clear he was still around. Her brother reported that his little hut had a small tin of salt in it when he returned…coincidentally just after the night of the New Moon.

As time passed, she could smell the change in the seasons by the bouquet that slowly infused the air—the thawing of ice and the subtle scents of new herbs and buds on the verge of opening.

_Spring._

Neither her nor her brother wanted to talk about spring. Seemingly trying to ignore it, her brother had disappeared one week and reported back that he had found a lord who wished to employ his services for the next few months.

She wondered why he was explaining this.

“But—” he said, giving her a look and an implication. It was obvious what he wanted from her. Frowning, she arched her eyebrow, acknowledging his look and his intent, but promised him nothing about _spring._

Instead, she made as though to go about the daily business of her life, and started tying up her ears in her head covering. She wanted, she told him vaguely, to check on poor Michiko who is due to give birth any day now. She’d do that before she decided anything.

The gray in his hair and his waggling ears disappeared beneath his helmet as he readied himself to leave for the north. ( _“Conveniently”_ she added in her mind.)

The duty of _spring_ lay heavily between then for a moment.

Her brother walked out of her hut, sliding his katana into his obi, and she followed quickly on his heels. As they walked together towards their separate destinations, she called to him. He turned, the dog of his faceplate snarling at her menacingly.

“If he won’t come to me, I’ll go to him,” she stated. Her brother’s expression was masked by the red, snarling dog.

Luckily, this was the only time of the year either of them reliably knew where he'd be.

After a moment, her brother nodded.

“Good,” he said. She wondered if it was.

***

The village she grew up in had changed.

In place of her childhood home was now a wealth of terrible smells of too many humans in too close of a proximity, and the noise, even muffled by the thick wrap of fabric around her ears, made her twitch uncomfortably. As she neared the shrine, the roll of human progress slowed and rice fields bordered by ancient forests began again. Although the scents lingered, she felt calmer when she finally saw the steps capped by the red torii gate, and a shrine still distant from a forest that, according to legend, once sealed a ferocious _youkai_ and bore his now forgotten name. One day, according to her mother, the shrine would one day move and enclose within it the forest and the tree where the story of her parents (and hers, by default) began. 

In the surrounding village, a vague tale still remained of the _Shikon no Tama_ and the _hanyou_ InuYasha who sought it, but the details no longer adhered faithfully to the stories she was told as a young girl. Naraku’s name had, in her opinion, fittingly been expunged from history. There were still legends of _mikos_ in these stories, but both her mother’s name and that of the woman who originally held her soul and her, perhaps, father’s heart (she certainly had never asked about _that_ ), were lost. But, they were all still vaguely bound up in a story that changed and hardened into something that was and was not itself all at the same time.

She entered the confines of a forest—her father’s forest—that was slowly shrinking, and, as she entered, felt something of the thrill of being a child again. Feeling a warmth that grew and suffused her whole body, she walked beneath familiar trees. Before she was even aware, she was stripping off her woven sandals, hiking up her _yukata_ , and running—taking flight into the branches, the bark rough, and yet comforting beneath her feet.

She flew above the tops of the trees, looking for the familiar shape of the largest tree in her immediate surroundings, the sun catching on the mottled silver of her hair as it fell free from her head wrap, the knot becoming looser due to her exertions. She spotted her destination, and, with a leap, propelled herself toward it, plummeting earthward and catching herself effortlessly on the branches.

The branches of Goshinboku, the nexus of her parent’s story, loomed ever closer: A story she could never wholly live up to in her own life. Hers was the story _after_ the happy ending. The one no one knew.

Suddenly nervous, she overshot the large tree and aimed for a clearing, landing in a crouch with an indelicate fluttering of her _yukata_ on the lip of an old, vine covered well.

For a moment, the tree and the well made her feel small again, just the daughter of her parents, when she was not yet acquainted with who they were when they themselves were younger…she thought back to when her mother was alive and her father carried her through these woods on his back, launching her into the air, free.

She inhaled the scent of the forest deeply—that preternatural mustiness that was always an undertone in her father’s scent.

That same dearly familiar scent wafted towards her from the direction of the tree. She stiffened for a moment, and, before she could think about it, ripped loose the cloth dangling from her hair. For a moment, she just sat on her mother’s well. Then, unhurried, she began to walk towards Goshinboku, knowing well that her father would be waiting for her there.

***

She saw the stone and the little Jizo that accompanied it nestled amongst the roots of the tree before she ever saw him. When she found him, he was high above, leaning against the trunk, looking anywhere but at the grave of her mother…and of his son who drew breath only for a moment when he emerged from a body whose soul had already fled.

She knelt down and clapped twice at the graves, reacquainting herself with a tragedy that had never ceased being. Even with the noise, her father gave no sign that he knew that she was there—but, then again, he had a nose, too, so he must have known precisely who had come.

Her father had shared seventeen years with her mother before, at her mother’s pleading, he had been forced to cut her body open with his claws in an attempt to free a child from the prison of her belly on a spring day decades and decades ago. That was before her soul proved too large for even his father’s sword to call back. Before the sword brought life back to his last child for a few minutes before it fluttered out again. Before he blamed himself for both of their deaths. Before he saw his remaining children’s hair turn gray before his eyes.

She stood up, but her eyes remained trained on the graves.

“Hello Chichue,” she said softly, knowing he could hear every word. For a moment there was only silence and she had the strange fear that he was once again avoiding her.

“Oi. What are you down there for?” he asked with an irritation that she forgave him for immediately.

Smiling, because it seemed all she could do, she took a great leap and landed on the branch next to him, plopping down with a languid grace only he could match. At first, she minded her brother’s advice and did not try to talk or explain why she had come.

But he was not one for words, and she could only fill the silence by looking at the line of her father’s face as he gazed towards the sunset. His expression was, as usual, fixed and guarded. In all his years, he had never, to her knowledge, hidden his ears or claws or been anything other than precisely who he was. 

Even now, when he was likely centuries older than her, she, his daughter, probably looked twenty or more years older than him. His father’s blood flowed so strongly within him that, even after all of those years, though his face had thinned from adolescence to adulthood, no wrinkles marred his skin and his hair was an untarnished silver that hers hadn’t been in more than a decade. 

That was one tragedy in his life that repeated over and over in any number of different incarnations: the blood of his father ran very strong in him. And for her and her brother, no matter how strong their own father’s blood ran within their veins, their mother’s ran there, too.

She wondered, looking at the smooth line of his jaw reflected against the setting sun, if her father considered that fact one of the triumphs of his difficult life, or simply another manifestation of that same tragedy.

But, she thought, pulling herself together, it didn’t really matter: she wanted to be his daughter, not another one of his tragedies.

So, she did the only sensible thing, she thumped him on the head as hard as she possibly could. And as she made that gesture, she decided that her brother was stupid, and that for once she was going to _talk to her father._

“Don’t just _leave_ ,” she shouted, without so much as a preamble. “Don’t just avoid me! Don’t think you can just _run_.”

His eyes went wide. It was the face that he made every single time her mother used the necklace he still wore even though he could have taken it off the moment she drew her last breath. Suddenly, regaining his usual demeanor, he clocked her back, hitting her directly between her ears, causing tears to start from her eyes.

“Whelp, don’t think you know _anything_!” he sputtered. “Why the hell did you come here anyways?”

Well, this was _talking_ , she supposed. And if they were talking, she might as well talk about what he really didn’t want to talk about…or even look at.

“Hahaue,” she said, under her breath. The branches of the tree shook in the early spring wind.

Her father clamped his mouth shut and something went dark in his eyes.

Then even more softly: “Chichue….I didn’t want you to be alone.”

She drew herself up and looked at him, even though she could see he was already retreating inside the thick shell that he had carried about him almost all of his life, the one that only her mother seemed able to let light into during a handful of years of his long, long life.

“And,” she added, looking into his unchanged face, stubbornly squaring her jaw like she had seen him do so many times before, “ _I_ don’t want to be alone either.”

He didn’t speak, her father. Words had never been how he had said anything important.

Even the day her mother came back, as Sango Oba-chan told it, he had lifted her from the well, but didn’t say anything of consequence. He might have even called her stupid—definitely the wrong words for the most important moment of his young life. 

That’s probably why he had always sent the children to their mother when they had needed words. But, he had been the one to put the fear of divine retribution into any village child that spoke a single word against any member of his family, proclaiming his love with his posture and, when necessary, his fists.

Nothing that was absolutely essential was said in words: his was a language of actions.

He spoke in the same way, now. He drew her to his chest like she was a little girl again, her head falling towards the hollow of his neck with the scent that he trailed into and out of her life in the years since her mother’s death filling her nostrils.

His words were soft, “I miss her, too, runt.”

At this small admission, she felt tears fill her eyes. She felt him stiffen, likely more at the change in scent than because he could see her. Uneasily, he patted her head a little too fast to be comforting, the same bewildered gesture he had always made throughout her youth whenever she had cried.

She thought of those three months after her mother had died. Of looking towards the road, waiting for that familiar blotch of red and silver to streak back towards her. Of a terrible feeling that woodpiles and fish and rabbits couldn’t entirely allay.

And into his chest she spoke her fear: “Don’t you leave me, too, Chichue.”

He stiffened again for a moment, and, almost as if physically coming to some resolution, his arms tightened around her almost imperceptibly. She thought that’s where it would end. Mostly because that is where it usually _did_ end.

“No,” he said softly. “I’ll keep watching out for you. You and your brother—you know you’re my life.”

For once she was the one who was silent, there, sitting in the branches of her parent’s tree, burrowing into the fabric of her father’s familiar _suikan_ like a lost pup, as her father’s strong arms held her and the stars rose over their heads. And, like she hadn’t in uncounted years, she fell asleep to the rhythmic sound of her father’s heart, broken so many times, but still going, his scent as familiar to her as her own.

***

Dawn came, casting its rays through the clearing and dipping her childhood world in a dream-like light.

When she awoke that morning, disoriented and with sore muscles (it had been a long time since she had slept on anything other than her own futon and the cold made her muscles ache), she seemed to be alone, and, for a moment, she thought, with a stab of bitter disappointment, that he had already gone.

Then, she realized her head was pillowed on the billowing fabric of a familiar, red _suikan_. And, in the morning light, she could hear a familiar voice say one word that immediately caught her entire attention.

_“Kagome.”_

His voice had lost all of its usual veneer of brashness and was uncharacteristically soft, and haltingly uncertain. She made no move other than to crane her ears in the direction of that unaccustomed tone, all the while continuing to feign sleep.

“I’m sorry I messed up with her…but you— _we_ —raised her so she’d tell me off…just like you. I told you I’d be by their side—I _promised_. And sometimes I mess up. It isn’t the first time. I guess…well, thought they didn’t need me—that—they…”

_We do, Chichue,_ she thought. 

He paused.

“They’re the most important things I have left. I have to remember…I’m their home, too, Kagome. Even if they’re grown. I guess I forget that sometimes without you to beat it into my head.”

This was her father _talking._

Unable to stop herself, she cracked open one of her eyes to watch him. 

He had leaned his head against the largest stone, and for a moment he looked older than his face would ever reflect. She had to stop herself from crying, knowing that he’d know she was awake and had been listening. Then the moment broken, he would dissolve into brash embarrassment. Instead, she made a sound as if she was waking up, a gentle turning over, so that she no longer had to look at the scene in front of her. She could imagine his ear flicking towards the sound and him straightening almost immediately, his usual self again.

Then, suddenly, he felt his weight on the branch next to her and a hesitant hand brush a tendril of hair from her face. Then he waited by her side until his only daughter awoke.

***

Spring faded into summer and drifted lazily ever towards autumn.

Her children came and went, and her brother returned. This time when her brother asked about “Oyaji” she could truthfully say she’d seen him and that they had even talked. Her brother smirked, not knowing precisely what that actually meant.

Then, one day, as the leaves lay thick upon the ground, and she returned from checking on Michiko’s colicky daughter, she saw that the woodpile had been replenished and was neatly stacked once more. As always, the woodpile was a dead giveaway. 

She sighed, knowing how these things went, and entered into her hut. Immediately her nose was hit by a familiar scent. There, lounging on his usual cushion, a mixture of boredom and annoyance on his young features, was her father.

“Oi, woman. Your brother says you feed him when he’s here.”

There, beside her pot, was a rabbit, cleaned and waiting.

“I feed you when you’re here, too,” she said, raising an eyebrow. “You just usually aren’t around to eat with me.”

He propped himself up on an elbow.

“Well, I’m here now, aren’t I?”

She rolled up the sleeves of her _yukata_ so her hands were free. Extending her claws, she diced the rabbit quietly and efficiently, seasoning it with the same set of herbs her mother had always used before sending the cubes of meat sizzling into the broth. 

“Yes, Chichue,” she said, “Now you’re home with me.”

****

Fin

**Author's Note:**

> I think, perhaps, this is the most consciously literary thing I’ve written for any fandom for a long time…even though it’s all a bit melancholic. I had the initial scene and the thought of InuYasha’s daughters gray hair implanted in my mind and then, one day, woke up at three in the morning to finish it in one gigantic outpouring of story. No, I don’t know what I did either.
> 
> Hope you enjoyed nonetheless.


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